Childhood, Literature and Science

Fragile Subjects

Jutta Ahlbeck, Päivi Lappalainen, Kati Launis, Kirsi Tuohela

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367886080
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351983013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do we understand, imagine and remember childhood? In what ways do cultural representations and scientific discourses meet in their ways of portraying children?

Childhood, Literature and Science aims to answer these questions by tracing how images of childhood(s) and children in Western modernity are entangled with notions of innocence and fragility, but also with sin and evilness. Indeed, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how different child figures emerge or disappear in imaginative and social representations, in the memories of adult selves, and in expert knowledge. Questions about childhood in Western modernity, culture and science are also addressed through insightful analysis of a variety of materials from the Enlightenment age to the present day – such as fiction, life narratives, visual images, scientific texts and public writings.

Analysing childhood as a discursive construction, Childhood, Literature and Science will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Childhood Studies, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Sociology of the Family.

Part I

The Ideal and Subversive Child

1 Child figures in Läsning för barn by Zacharias Topelius¹

Päivi Lappalainen

My darling little friends, (…) I will tell you that my little book does not contain much learning. It is like a little bird that flutters amongst flowers and grasses, dallying with fancies and thoughts. I fain would that I could have plucked a pen from the angel’s pinions, but as I could not do that, I have taken one from my own breast, nearest my heart. I would that my little scroll might become the property of little children.

(Topelius 1881, X–XI)

This is how Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898), a Finnish writer, wrote to his little Anglophone readers in the foreword to Whisperings in the Wood, a collection of fairy tales and plays written by him. It is not purely by chance that he, nature lover and an early conservationist, compares his book and himself to a bird.

In Finland, children’s literature began to flourish in the nineteenth century in the wake of Romanticism as it did in many other European countries. One of the first books was Tidsfördrif för mina barn (1799, ‘Entertainment for my Children’), a collection of educational children stories written by Archbishop Jakob Tengström (1755–1832). Whereas Tengström’s stories had still a strong flavour of Enlightenment’s didacticism and moral lessons and his characters were little sinners, Zacharias Topelius, who began to write for children with his Sagor (1847, ‘Stories’), a collection of fairy tales, depicted children who were flesh and blood. Inspired especially by German and Finnish folk tales and by the work of Hans Christian Andersen, Topelius, the father figure of Finnish children’s literature, was – together with Andersen – the founder of the literary fairy tale, Künstmärchen, in the Nordic countries where he was popular and a paragon. As Ingrid Nettervik (2007, 43) puts it, thanks to him, the artistic quality took root as much as pedagogy in Nordic children’s books.

Zacharias Topelius was a journalist, a fiction writer and a professor of Finnish history, acting for a couple of years also as the rector of the University of Helsinki. He was an extraordinarily versatile and productive writer who wrote both for adults and for children. His career as an author of children’s literature lasted over 50 years. Though he wrote in Swedish, he had a long-lasting fame and influence in the bilingual Finland thanks to his works for children and to his two textbooks, Naturens Bok (1856, ‘Nature’s Book’) and Boken om Vårt Land (1875, ‘A Book about our Country’), which were used also in Finnish-language schools in Finnish translations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first collection of Sagor came out only two years later than Ljungblommor (1845, ‘Heather Blossom’), a collection of poems with which he began his career as a fiction writer and up to 1852, there came out three more collections of fairy tales and poems (see e.g. Klinge s.a.).

Series of Sagor included altogether 26 fairy tales and poems. For Topelius, it was typical that he published his texts – poems, short stories, serialized novels, articles as well as children’s literature – first in newspapers and magazines namely in Eos. Tidskrift för barn och barnens vänner, the first Finnish children’s magazine (1854–1866) which published over a hundred of his poems, tales and plays for children. When Eos ceased to exist, Topelius continued to publish his works in other children’s magazines in Finland as well as in the other Nordic countries, especially in Sweden. All over the Nordic countries, those who were responsible for children’s magazines saw his participation as almost crucial for their publications (Svensson 2008, 154). Thirteen of his tales were translated into English and came out in Aunt Judy’s Magazine between the years 1874–1877. There were also other tales published in English magazines, e.g. in The Strand Magazine, a widely circulated contemporary periodic publication (Siegfrids 1998, 40–41; see also Hahn 2015).

Most of the material that originally appeared in magazines was rewritten and republished by Topelius in his Läsning för barn (‘Reading for Children’), an eight-volume collection (1865–1896) comprising altogether almost 270 plays, poems and fairy tales. Läsning för barn doesn’t contain all the texts he wrote for children. He didn’t include, for example, some of the fairy tales he had published in his first collections because he wasn’t sure any more if all of them were suitable for young readers. In the fairy tale ‘Blomstertinget’ (‘The Thing of Flowers’), the flowers ponder, among other things, questions concerning love and Dahlia, the queen of flowers, complains that the butterfly Apollo has been unfaithful to her and has flirted with Reseda who was engaged to a bee. According to Valfrid Vasenius (1931, 495, 497), the fairy tale was a culmination of Topelius’ ‘romantic’ work, and the author said later that the text didn’t correspond to the naivety needed in fairy tales. The statement tells us that the aging author became more conservative than he was in his early days. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no erotic overtones in the tales in Läsning för barn.

In this chapter, I will discuss the child figures depicted in different texts of Läsning för barn.² First, I will briefly look at Topelius’ opinions on children in his essays which can be found in the posthumously published collection Blad ur min tänkebok (1898, ‘Leaves from my Book of Thoughts’). As many scholars have pointed out, childhood was established as a distinct and separate period of life by the end of the eighteenth century (see e.g. Ariès 1962; James, Jenks and Prout 1998). In the wake of Rousseau, the Romantic writers like William Blake and William Wordsworth constructed childhood as a time of innocence and the latter ‘discovered’ it as a great source of inspiration, the primal force which drives all creativity. Whereas Blake created a paradigm of ironic use of the child’s voice, Wordsworth’s paradigm was one of the green world and the natural child (Natov 2003, 21, 49). Topelius could be said to follow the Wordsworthian paradigm when creating his child figures.

Topelius’ concept of childhood and the ideal child of the nation

According to Topelius (1898, 84–85), the child isn’t innocent in that sense that she or he is sinless or without selfishness, jealousy, stubbornness or other faults which are either inherited or acquired. These faults appear already before the child can speak. The child is innocent only in that sense that she or he is incomplete, i.e. she or he cannot understand the cause–effect relationship, the action and the reaction; a child acts immediately on the basis of her or his impression. This unaccountability, spontaneity, is, at the same time, both her or his weakness and her or his strength. Topelius stresses that the child sees the world as a totality, which, according to him, means objectivity. For the child, toys live and they are the things they represent, animals speak and the forest sings. When Topelius points out that children’s perception corresponds to that of the primordial human being, der Urmench, and his paradise, he clearly follows the Romantics, especially Wordsworth who saw childhood as a paradise, but a lost one, growing up being synonymous with the loss of paradise (Hendrick 2015, 32). For Topelius, it is reflection which splits the world; the splitting is unavoidable but it shouldn’t happen too soon. He ends his essay by praising the infantile omnipotence: ‘Yes, what a happy age when one is everything, believes everything, knows everything and can do everything!’ (Topelius 1898, 86).³

Nature was as important to Zacharias Topelius as it was to the Romantics and, just like them, he understood it as an organic whole. He preserved the Rousseaun child–nature relationship and used metaphors retrieved from nature when he described the child: ‘There is no more fruitful soil for good and bad seeds than the heart of a child. A word germinates; an impression takes root; an expression of love bears fruit’ (Topelius 1898, 85). Also, Rousseau drew a parallel between the child and the plant; nature is a quality in the child who must be cultivated like a plant (see Rose 1993, 44). Albeit these kinds of metaphors link Topelius not only to Rousseau and to the Romantic writers but as well to Friedrich Froebel, a German pedagogue who created the concept kindergarten, literally ‘children’s garden’, and whose thoughts were introduced first in Finland by Zacharias Topelius already in 1856 in the newspaper Helsingfors Tidningar.

According to Froebel, children differ from adults. For him, the educator must be like a gardener who is orientated to the future. He must know that from a seed, there will grow a plant which will be a new manifestation of the same seed. The same thing happens to a human being and that is why she or he always carries ‘the child’ inside her or him. The child has to become aware of her or his self-expression and development in a natural way (see Jantunen 2008, 67). In his article, Topelius wrote that Froebel’s system of education could have an unpredictable effect on the corporal and moral development of the forthcoming generations. He stressed the pedagogue’s view that it was never too early to cultivate the child’s love for beauty since it was the way to prepare her for being able to love good things (Topelius 1856).

Topelius aspired to follow Froebel’s child-centred principles of pedagogy and the didactic aspect is quite strong in his texts – as it was among his contemporaries. The romantic concept of childhood Topelius internalized can be said to be a positive form of adultism which means that from the adult’s point of view, the adult is a mature human being with social competence, but the child is immature, imperfect and needs to be socialized. The child is seen as a creature in the process of becoming, not yet being in the sense adults are. For the positively charged adultism, the child is a creature to be protected (Paulin 2012, 54–59). Zacharias Topelius wrote his texts for the children of the upper class and the bourgeoisie and many of his fairy tales and stories depicting poor people were aimed to teach the middle-class children to feel sympathy for those who were worse off. Another purpose was to teach all children to love God and the fatherland.

Topelius accomplished his magnificent life’s work influenced by the awakening of nationalism at the time when Finland was a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. For him, his young audience was a growing generation maturing into a nation state. When writing for children, Topelius had an ideal child of this nation state in mind; however, the child figures we find as characters in his works are not idealized. They can be fallible, jealous, naughty, even bad, but the target of the lesson such children learn is the ideal child of the nation. The Topelian child is not bad as such but a fallible creature who also learns her or his lesson.

Princes, princesses and ordinary children

One should keep in mind that because nature was very important for Topelius, children are not always the protagonists of his stories, fairy tales and poems. Human beings – children or adults – are at the centre of attention only in one third of the fairy tales. The subject of the tales can be apart from animals and flowers an old cottage or an abstract thing like the love of fatherland. It is, though, characteristic that nature is mostly anthropomorphized, i.e. human form or attributes are ascribed to animals, plants and material objects. Child figures can be based either on fantasy or realism. As mentioned earlier, Topelius used old motifs in many of his fairy tales; some of his fairy tales were adaptations of old folk tales like ‘Prinsessan Törnrosa’ (‘The Sleeping Beauty’), a play he published in 1870. It is based on a motif which had lived in different versions in Europe for over 600 years, best known as Charles Perrault’s ‘La Belle au bois dormant’ (1696). Topelius knew also the version of the brothers Grimm. It is an entertaining and exciting play, one of Topelius’ best ones, which, however, has also darker overtones pointing to the famine years Finland had suffered at the end of 1860s (Apo 2005, 168).

Topelius wrote numerous plays for children which were meant to be performed at schools and at homes for a limited audience. His children’s plays formed the core of children’s theatre repertoires at both theatres and schools throughout Finland till the middle of the twentieth century (see Mustonen 2008). Many of them depicted, as did ‘Prinsessan Törnrosa’, royal families and no wonder the most frequent word referring to a human being in the entire eight-volume collection of Läsning för barn is (apart the word ‘child’ which is to be found 1,000 times) the word ‘king’ (758 times) while the word ‘queen’ is mentioned only 282 times. The word ‘princess’ can be found more often (312 times) than ‘queen’, but once again, less frequently than the word ‘prince’ (347 times). One explanation for the high frequency of occurrence of the word ‘king’ is that in many plays and fairy tales, he doesn’t have a proper name but is only referred to by his status. However, the same holds true for the word ‘queen’ and, therefore, such an explanation is not entirely convincing. When one adds that the words ‘God’ or ‘(heavenly) Father’ are mentioned 782 times, it is possible to say that the world portrayed in the texts written by Topelius is quite patriarchal. There is only one exception: the word ‘mother’ is used more often (580 times) than the word ‘father’ (383 times), which refers to the fact that it was mothers who mainly took care of the children in the bourgeois homes.

Many of the stories have more than one child as the protagonist. The children as protagonists are often siblings, a sister and a brother as in ‘Björken och stjärnan’ (‘The Birch and the Star’), presumably the most famous fairy tale written by Topelius. It is a story about war orphans who are taken away in a foreign land where they are looked after well, but who can’t forget their home country Finland. After some time, they decide to get back home, following only two signs, the birch and the star: ‘If we see the star shining through the leaves of the birch, we shall know that we are at home’ (Topelius 1915, 14). Having put their trust in God and guided by angels disguised as birds they eventually find their home and their parents. The didactic message of the tale is the eternal love of the fatherland. In this tale, the older and protective child is a boy, and, upon the whole, in Topelius’ tales boys are protagonists more often than girls. In the entire collection of Läsning för barn, the word referring to a boy is used more frequently (881 times) than that referring to a girl (560 times). In addition, girls are depicted more often in the poems so the boy figures get more textual place as far as the text length is concerned.

The child figures in Topelius’ work are specifically Finnish children with the exception of fairy tales ‘Sampo Lappelill’ (‘Sampo the Lapp’) and ‘Stjernöga’ (‘Star-Eye’) where the child protagonists belong to the Sámi people. In the latter, the little Sámi girl is a personification of innocence, perception and poetry (Orlov 2003, 75). A settler finds her on Christmas Eve lying in a snowdrift, wrapped in reindeer skin and looking at the stars:

It looked at the stars, and … [t]hose boundless, numberless, beautiful and distant suns twinkling in the night sky seemed to take pity on the defenseless human child lying there in the snow … and the starlight stayed in the child’s eyes.

(Topelius 1984/1873)

The traveller takes her to his home. In the settler’s superstitious wife, Topelius depicts the disdain and fear towards the Sámi people and their alleged witchcraft. There is no doubt on whose side his sympathy lies. Occasionally, some other ethnicities are represented in Topelius’ works as in the play ‘Rinaldo Rinaldini’ where girls play the roles of Preciosa and Esmeralda, two literary figures representing Roma girls. Topelius has been criticized harshly for his representation of the ethnic groups like Roma and especially Jews, but here, again, the question is more complex as Viola Parente-Čapková (2011, 14–15) points out.

Gendered roles

Topelius’ child figures are heavily gendered and they carry their respective stereotyped gender roles. This is best exemplified in the poems ‘Till en Gosse’ (‘To the Boy’) and ‘Till en Flicka’ (‘To the Girl’). Already in the first stanzas (here in prose form), we can perceive a difference, although in both poems, typically, the author uses metaphors referring to nature:

Be healthy and happy / And flourish / Like the fresh leaves when young / You, the king of plays! / And grow as strong / And straight and free / As a pine / In the soil of your homeland.

(‘Till en Gosse’)

You child of the spring, you healthy / You happy little friend / Who has a heart and the wings of a siskin / Grow as a flower in the meadow / In the shine of morning sun / When the bees and the bumblebees hum ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Child figures as fragile subjects
• PART I: The Ideal and Subversive Child
• PART II: The ‘Normal’ Child
• PART III: The Sick and Disabled Child
• PART IV: The Evil and Victimised Child
• PART V: The Lost Child
• Index